NEWSHUMANITARIAN RELIEF

The following post comes from Jamie Drummond, the Executive Director of ONE.

It’s over a month since famine was declared in Somalia and alarm bells clearly rung about serious food shortages across Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. 12 million people in the Horn of Africa are in desperate need of food, clean water and basic sanitation and we are all asking: how can this be happening again? In this past month we have seen differing responses locally, regionally and globally to the crisis. Already there are lessons we must learn about how to stop famine happening again.

As Richard Dowden noted previously on this blog there are many political factors that complicate the situation in Somalia. Any lasting solution will require a regional roadmap out of the Somali cycle of failed statism. Eritrea and others must be brought around a table with other regional governments, and representatives from wide cross section of Somali civil society. Maybe this famine will reenergise the too often stalled process. However politics is not the only factor here and there are other lessons to learn.

Peter Biro writes for the International Rescue Committee from the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya where he saw first hand refugees seeking aid in the face of the famine in the horn of Africa. All photos by Peter Biro.

Our car is skidding across the deep sand tracks that cut through Hagadera, one of three sites that make up the sprawling Dadaab refugee camp near the Kenya-Somalia border. More than 1,300 refugees, fleeing drought and famine in southern Somalia, are arriving every day in the already overcrowded camp. Under such conditions infectious disease can spread quickly.

This morning, I’m traveling with an IRC medical team that is vaccinating refugee children against polio and measles, part of a mass immunization campaign that aid groups are conducting in Dadaab. All told, some 120,000 refugee children under the age of five will be inoculated over the next five days, a quarter of them by the IRC’s medical teams.

“The Somali refugees are malnourished and very weak,” says Antonia Kamore, the IRC’s community health program officer, who is sitting beside me. “This makes them even more susceptible to disease.”

After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Masaya Uchino - a law student in San Francisco - and his parents waited 12 hours to find out if our family and friends in Tokyo were alright. While waiting, he donated some money by texting the Red Cross with hopes that it would help the millions of other affected by the horrible tragedy.

The following Monday he found out that his donation wouldn’t actually reach Japan for somewhere between 30 and 90 days. So he started a petition asking the mobile phone companies to process donations for Japan in the same way they did for Haiti – so the money would get there straight away.

As the petition climbed toward 50,000 signatures, California Senator Barbara Boxer took note and wrote to the CEOs of the major mobile carriers echoing Masaya’s petition.

At the end of last week, California Senator Barbara Boxer joined the call for mobile phone companies to expedite donations to Japan in the same way the did for Haiti.

With her support, news organizations in San Francisco realized this was a real story, and Masaya Uchino – the law student who created the petition just a week ago – found himself doing interviews with his local news stations as to why expediting donations is such a big deal.

He did a terrific job emphasizing the importance of his petition to a large number of people around the Bay Area, and also had the added benefit of having the news crews calling mobile phone companies to find out why they are treating this emergency differently.

Text-to-give programs have proven a powerful way to collect donations, with the American Red Cross reporting that they raised $32 million from mobile phone donations to help relief efforts in Haiti last year. The effort catapulted mobile phone giving into the mainstream – it was even hailed as a turning point for mobile business more broadly.

But the way donations worked for Haiti is not the way they operate now. For Haiti, mobile carriers passed a donation along to relief organizations as soon as you texted. For Japan, they are waiting until your next billing cycle to pass along the donation.

It’s because of this switch in policy that Change.org member Masaya Uchino created a massively successful petition asking cell phone companies to follow the same policy for Japan as they did for Haiti. He said:

When you text on your cell phone to donate to a charity or NGO, the process works in a peculiar way.

First, the mobile phone company registers that you’ve made a donation and adds that amount to your next bill. Then after you pay the bill, your phone company will transfer the money to a non-profit like mGive, which has partnered with mobile phone carriers to certify charity organizations doing mobile donations. Then mGive transfers your donation to the charity you had specified with your original message. At this point as many as 90 days may have passed.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As the mGive Foundation notes; “In response to the Haiti Relief Effort, carriers are remitting  donations immediately to nonprofit organizations. “

So why aren’t they doing that for Japan?

Masaya Uchino, a Japanese-American law student in San Francisco, has started a petition asking mGive, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint to sort it out.

“When I first head about the earthquake I was in total shock.  I called my parents to see if they heard anything from our family. That was about 11:30 at night, and we didn’t hear back that they were all ok until around noon the next day.”

As a Haitian farmer, Jacqueline Morette knows about challenges. Although about half of Haiti’s workforce (including 75 percent of low-income Haitians), relies on agriculture to survive, just one farmer in ten has access to irrigation. Most farm on small plots of land, and few have the luxury of using machines or fertilizers.

“Most Haitians are food insecure,” said Morette during a US speaking tour last October. “A lot of our kids are malnourished.”

As Morette explained, it’s also hard for Haitian farmers to earn an income by selling their crops. Roads are bad, and food can spoil on the way to the market. Fluctuating food prices - caused in part by a flood of low-cost imported products like rice - mean that growers might not get a fair price.

Update: BP has now stopped all business with Libya, and growing sanctions may soon stop others as well.

As unrest in Libya grew into full fledged violent clashes, Change.org member Alyssa Kwan saw a crucial chance to make a difference: calling on BP, one of the largest companies doing business with the Gaddafi regime, to suspend operations in Libya.

She launched a concise and effective petition, which quickly gathered more than 2,500 signatures. The UN seemed to agree with the sentiment, imposing sanctions on the current Libyan government and referring several members of the regime to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Five years ago this week, I won an Olympic gold medal in men's speed skating.

I won by the largest margin in that event in more than 20 years. This is the shining line on my resume – both literal and social. Every day for the last five years I am not introduced as just “Joey Cheek," but as “Olympic Gold Medalist Joey Cheek."

However, as much as that moment changed my life, I’ve learned that what we achieve for ourselves rarely provides long-term pride when compared to the things we achieve for others.

Americans love the Olympics… when they are on. The Olympic spotlight is brief, but when that light is upon us, it burns brightly. I knew that if I won the gold, I would have only a few seconds to capture the world’s attention. I had to make it count.

After I won, I announced that I would be donating my winnings to support the people of war torn Darfur and encouraged others to do the same.